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the spirit of water • magda minguzzi
Our discussion thus far has only touched on one of the two roots of the de facto terra nullius narrative. The term in fact derives from res nullius in Roman law “In Romano-centric jurisprudence, these lands were by definition not owned by anyone and were fair game for annexation. In the Roman mind, such lands awaited Romanization, a service the Empire was eager to provide in Gaul, Germania, Britannia, Spain and, not incidentally, in its ‘granary’ of North Africa” (Geisler 2012). The other root of the ideology is Judeo-Christian in origin. “From this perspective, terra nullius faithfully re-enacted the Euro-Christian dogma of creation: something providential arising from nothing (ex nihilo). It was a short and convenient step to equate a lack of private ownership with emptiness (terra nullius) a void awaiting the dominion of monotheists and their laws” (Geisler 2012). This speaks of the European misconception that these lands were spiritually and culturally void. This idea formed the basis of another arm of the colonial project justifying, in the eyes of the world, the cultural and religious imposition represented by mission settlements. Mission Settlements Evangelical occupation is fundamentally linked to the colonial project; under the pretence of educating and Christianizing uncivilized and heathen populations which, in the eyes of Europeans at the time, lacked an appropriate form of spirituality. This deprecatory view of Indigenous peoples was consolidated and shaped by most of the writings and representations produced by the explorers. Nigel Penn (2013), in Written Culture and the Cape Khoikhoi, eloquently highlights this notion noting that, prior to Peter Kolb’s (1719) accurate work based on observation, representations of Indigenous peoples in South Africa were based on classical or biblical iconography rather than direct observation. These representations were structured by the belief that the further one moved from the “known” world and the centre of Western “civilization” the more one risked encountering the “wilderness” and “savagery”. “The Bible taught that the world’s centre was the Holy Land and the further from this centre one strayed the closer one came to savagery. Classical writers of Greece and Rome also drew a distinction between the civilised and barbaric, the latter category of person being, obviously, the people beyond the boundary of Greece and Rome” (Penn 2013:168). Artists were no less prejudiced, producing works that were significantly derogatory of the First Nation. A classic example is Charles Bell’s painting16 “The Landing of van Riebeeck at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652” Table Bay, Cape Town, on 6 April 1652. This 1850 painting, representing a historical event, was produced in response to an appeal by the conveners of the first Fine Arts Exhibition at the Cape in “Charles Davidson Bell was born in Scotland, and arrived in the Cape in 1830, at the invitation of his uncle, Colonel John Bell, who was then Colonial Secretary. At the age of twenty-one, he joined Dr Andrew Smith’s “Expedition for Exploring Central Africa” with the task of keeping a visual diary of the expedition by sketching the landscapes and the Indigenous peoples they encountered. After his return from this expedition, Bell worked in various government departments and in 1838 he started working in the survey department, becoming, in 1848, Surveyor-General of the Cape. Bell won a gold medal for the “Best original history painting” entitled “The Landing of van Riebeeck at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652”, now held in the SA Library, Cape Townz, <https://digitalcollections.lib.uct.ac.za/bell/ charles-davidson-bell> (05/03/2019).
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